Striking out and winning in Colorado

Friday night on the broadcast JD mentioned a pet theory he had about success in Coors field. Considering how much the ball flies off the bat when put in play in the high elevation of Colorado, he wondered if the team that struck out less often therefore won more games.

So I brushed the dust off my retrosheet database that's been dormant since my two toddlers tied me up with duct tape and scrounged up some data to investigate JD's theory.

I'm using data from 2002-2012 for this mostly because it was readily available to me.

If the team that struck out more in a single game lost that game, I'd mark it as a "THEORY_YES." If the team that struck out fewer times won I'd mark it as a "THEORY_NO". If the teams struck out the same amount of times I marked it as a tie.

In Coors field from 2002-2012:

	THEORY_YES	THEORY_NO	TIE	N/A	YES%
COL GAMES	442	352	105	0	55.7

So, yes, the team that strikes out less wins more often in Coors-- 55.7% of the time (if we throw out the "tie" games. JD's suspicions are correct in this respect.

But how does this compare to games in other parks? It stands to reason that if you aren't striking out as much as the other team you are probably having a better day offensively, no matter what park you are in. That's just the laws of baseball.

So for all other games in that same time period:

	THEORY_YES	THEORY_NO	TIE	N/A	YES%
COL	442	352	105	0	55.7
NON-COL GAMES	13952	9495	2736	3	59.5

So that 55.7% advantage is actually less than the league as a whole. Your guess is as good as mine as to why this is the case, but my guess is randomness. The league rate sits at 60%-ish pretty steadily from year-to-year over that timeframe, but with a yearly sample of just 81 games, the rate for games  in Colorado jumps around quite a bit.

	YEAR	THEORY YES	THEORY NO	TIE	N/A games	YES%
COL	2002	49	26	6	0	65.3
NON-COL GAMES	2002	1278	852	248	1	60
COL	2003	36	37	8	0	49.3
NON-COL GAMES	2003	1273	865	248	1	59.5
COL	2004	36	33	12	0	52.2
NON-COL GAMES	2004	1228	873	280	0	58.4
COL	2005	43	28	10	0	60.6
NON-COL GAMES	2005	1237	870	272	1	58.7
COL	2006	43	28	10	0	60.6
NON-COL GAMES	2006	1242	881	255	0	58.5
COL	2007	42	40	5	0	51.2
NON-COL GAMES	2007	1302	861	209	0	60.2
COL	2008	32	35	14	0	47.8
NON-COL GAMES	2008	1238	909	232	0	57.7
COL	2009	43	25	15	0	63.2
NON-COL GAMES	2009	1240	872	265	0	58.7
COL	2010	43	29	9	0	59.7
NON-COL GAMES	2010	1346	822	213	0	62.1
COL	2011	38	35	8	0	52.1
NON-COL GAMES	2011	1280	845	261	0	60.2
COL	2012	37	36	8	0	50.7
NON-COL GAMES	2012	1288	845	253	0	60.4

I cross-referenced a lot of this data with baseball-reference and found no discrepancies, but since I'll readily admit I may be rusty if anyone is passionate enough to want to check my work here it is:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z91VCEqpSDng2OJ8z1Wv9g3JMnJSCQyNaITVGSptoE4/edit?usp=sharing